


echoes

by mymphr



Series: echoes in my bones like church bells [1]
Category: Elementary (TV), The Shining - Stephen King
Genre: Autistic Character, Ghosts, Mental Health Issues, Murder, Other, Psychic Abilities, and i love the shining so, i.e. sherlock though this may never be actually said in the fic he is autistic, possible trigger warnings, will give them as chapters go on
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-12-09
Updated: 2015-01-14
Packaged: 2018-02-28 20:37:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2746175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mymphr/pseuds/mymphr
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are few people who understand Sherlock Holmes, himself barely included. A brain like a fireplace full of ash, abilities that he cannot quite explain even to himself, and a thousand self destructive desires which only sometimes serve other people well, he has a mutual lack of understanding with the rest of the world. </p><p>However many chapters I end up writing of Sherlock, who has the shine. Some liberties may have been taken with what that entails, but I like to think it's different for each person who has it. His mental health issues may also come into this fairly heavily.</p><p>(you do not need to know anything about The Shining to read this; 'the shine' is basically ability to read minds, feel other people's emotions, see ghosts and things like that)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> i wanted to write about (autistic, mentally ill) Sherlock who could see ghosts and possibly read minds, and i have fairly recently read the Shining and loved it very dearly. my link to the Shining may be tenuous at best, but i like to think that the Shine is unique and personal to each person, and this is, perhaps, how my Sherlock experiences it. 
> 
> possible trigger warnings: prostitution, murder, murder-suicide, abuse

In a hotel room, air damp with breath, sweat and mildew, she was afraid. In the same hotel room, air and skin damp with breath, sweat and mildew, and perhaps a little blood, he was not.

In the moment, he barely noticed. If he had, he would not have been angry, like she might have expected. She was not afraid because of his actions. She was afraid because she did not know him. He didn’t blame her. Someone significantly larger than her who had, seconds ago, been having the sex he’d paid for, was acting strangely. She had almost certainly heard stories that begun like this

_(apparently he leapt away from her and she asked what was wrong and he started hitting her and didn’t stop until she stopped shouting)_

and ended far worse than hers would.

He peeled away from her in the thick darkness, a gentle hand on her mouth for a moment as he hushed her. The room was remarkably silent, bar a soft hum in his left ear which he had not tuned out as he had been told he would. She was remarkably silent.

Sweat and darkness leaking between his lips as he opened them, he whispered, gently, into the room. She closed her eyes, huddled to the bed board, and hoped, loudly (though internally), that he would not kill her. He wished she would stop thinking so noisily. His whispers filled the room, quiet and foreign, tumbling from his dry lips where he stood at the foot of the bed.

_(please tell me what you need i can hear you i can almost see you if you just let me see you please i can help you please let me help you i know you want me to help you i know you’re hurting people here i can feel it in the aching of my bones i can feel that you’re scared i can feel y)_

Finally, _finally,_ after what was far too long for both of them, he breathed in. The hollow thump as his head hit the ground surprised her, but she did not clothe herself and run for help for the naked man on the hotel carpet for another minute. Fear and confusion were spectacular things, and she did not expect her third job to go awry in such a way.

By the time she came back with a quiet ginger boy with minimal first aid training, he was gone, £200 in £5 notes and £1 coins on the bed, and questions in her head about what that man had been doing that would never truly be answered until the day she

(7 years later at the age of 29, at the meaty hands of a fiancée who believed too much of what his drunken father told him)

died.

In an alley in the East end of London, Sherlock clutched at his ribs, gasping for air that was filled with oxygen rather than tobacco smoke and car fumes. The years had taught him how to control the things in his head, to a degree, but sometimes he couldn’t help it. Ghosts (though this word was, in his head, different from what some might think; the dead, the living, the old and the new, an echo of times passed and times yet to come) would flicker in his mind and he would be unable to stop himself trying to grasp them.

A year before he hired someone to have sex with in a hotel in the East end of London, 3 women were killed in a hotel in the East end of London. A week after he hired someone to have sex with in a hotel in the East end of London, and tried to grab hold of a ghost that wanted equally to grab him, a woman was found gutted next to a husband with too many pills in his stomach, in a hotel in the East end of London.

There were some mysteries Sherlock did not need deductive skills to solve. These were often those that the police wanted him to solve, but that he refused. They had stopped questioning his process for deciding what cases to take, as to someone who did not have

(the shine, he would whisper inside his head but never say out loud, even to himself)

it would not make sense.


	2. recovery

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> His eyes used to snap open at a touch, lungs pushing cries from his throat at the slightest noise. Nowadays, he let her run her hands down his back, under his hips, through his stomach. He let her whisper words he couldn’t understand next to his neck, he let her mutter and scream and cry. He didn’t need to fight with her anymore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw for self harm, drugs, depression, ghosts

She whispered in his ear, cold air sending shooting pains down his spine and a sudden rush of oxygen to his lungs; he curled up tighter, teeth gritted and ribs aching. She grazed his bruises, gentle touch numbing the skin for a split second, lack of feeling writhing across his body like worms

_(he didn’t like thinking about being buried, about the worms crawling over him and under him and inside of him)_

His eyes used to snap open at a touch, lungs pushing cries from his throat at the slightest noise. Nowadays, he let her run her hands down his back, under his hips, through his stomach. He let her whisper words he couldn’t understand next to his neck, he let her mutter and scream and cry. He didn’t need to fight with her anymore.

Much to the dismay of nurses and doctors and rehabilitation nurses, he’d stubbornly spent the first week they let him in bed. They called it depression, told him he needed medicine and therapy and friends. He did not tell them he had someone to talk to, for he did not need more labels. No logical person (including himself, had he not experienced it since childhood) would believe the drug addict with existing mental health conditions could legitimately see dead people. Rosenhan’s theories that labels are slapped on people depending on context aside; no one would believe that a perfectly healthy, neurotypical, alcohol and drug free person could legitimately see dead people.

So he never told them, and over time he got used to it. There were only two occasions he was found in a bloodied mess, tears in his clothes and his skin, blubbering about how he had to do it for her, that she was screaming and screaming and he had to make her stop

_(he didn’t understand her words, but he could understand the noises; the agony in her screams spoke to him on a level that he couldn’t understand himself. she was not telling him to do things but he knew he had to do them; for her, for himself, for everyone, he knew, so he did them, he pushed the sharp edges against his skin and he threw his body at the walls and he threw his furniture to the ground,)_

and they told him he was broken, that he needed help. They cried ‘suicide attempt’ and ‘self harm’. They washed the blood from his clothes and he learnt not to try and put it back. In turn, they learned to stop giving him medicine that he would throw up or vehemently refuse to take or run from, and started trying to get him to go to therapy. It was a price he was willing to pay if it would meant they would leave him alone. Every medicine they tried to give him scared him. He feared addiction (though he knew the point of them was to stop him being addicted to things), and he feared that he would no longer be able to shine, and he feared that he would tell them about it, and that they would call him broken and keep him here forever.

He hated the place. For the normal reasons; for the lack of freedom, the tedium, the initial bitterness at being told what he was or wasn’t allowed. The self loathing, the anger, the withdrawal. He hated himself, and he hated the lack of drugs in his veins sometimes, and he hated that he hated it. But he hated parts of it for entirely different reasons from the others; the ghosts in his mind weren’t in his mind, they danced through his room in a different realm, singing in languages he wasn’t sure were real, whispering to him words he could not comprehend yet understood anyway. They drove him to things he knew he had to do, to a blood covered mess on the ground surrounded by disappointed doctors and grinning ghosts. He was scared of them, but this was one area in his life where he would always be alone. He’d learned to deal with it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if it wasn't clear, this is set in rehab
> 
> and i apologise if it is a bit short and weird, i wrote it pretty much in one go - i can essentially only write when i've just had a really depressive episode, also, so that's why everything is so sporadic
> 
> thank you for reading

**Author's Note:**

> if you like the idea of a. bipolar Sherlock and b. Sherlock who can see ghosts, please consider reading 'tell me we're dead and i'll love you even more ' by postcardmystery (http://archiveofourown.org/works/537917) as it is wonderful and probably my favourite fanfiction in the world. 
> 
> this will possibly have more chapters, but i cannot make any promises. if you want more, let me know.
> 
> also please lmk about any mistakes or things that dont make sense, thanks!


End file.
